This invention relates to the publication of customized and personalized newspapers, newsletters, magazines, periodicals, journals, catalogs, books and other printed media.
The current state of the art in the print publishing world is primarily to “broadcast” identical issues of a publication to all customers. Although electronic media, such as Internet sites, allow customization of information for various customer segments and/or individuals, print media has generally remained un-customized. Rather, periodicals, books and other print media are often targeted to a particular market segments in a coarse-grained manner. Prior art in print media customization relates to simple regional customization in newspapers and to some extent periodicals. Minor customization of books is also not unknown. However, the ability to mass customize print media such as newspapers, books, magazines, etc. has not been a reality.
Unfortunately, this coarse-grained approach to the delivery of printed material puts real limits on the value of the print media to its customers, and limits the ability to adequately contextualize print advertising for the consumers of the print media. A by-product of this lack of contextualization is the reduction in the potential value of print media advertising.
Electronic media allows for better customization, and this will become increasingly effective. However, print media will continue to have significant advantages for some time to come. For example, print media is often more convenient than electronic media. It is highly portable, always available, etc. Also, the resolution of print is better than that of display screens, which reduces reading fatigue.
The historic lack of customization of print media is primarily due to the processes and technologies involved. It has simply generally been prohibitively expensive to customize print runs of a particular magazine or book for specific organizations and individuals. This is partly due to the economics of content assembly, layout and printing. It is also partly due to limitations of sufficient, high quality and modular content, and the ability to easily aggregate and understand customer preferences for content, and effective organization and display of content.
However, recent advances in software and printing technologies have enabled a much more economic and extensive customization of print media. For example, leveraging digital press technology, magazine-quality printers are now much less expensive—enabling more cost-effective very short print runs. This has made the “bottleneck” to highly customized and personalized print media to be one of information management rather than that of the mechanics of volume printing. Fortunately advanced information processes will increasingly become available to make true customization of print media feasible. In particular, the Internet, as a mass information management and gathering environment enables the intelligent surveying, aggregation and analysis of print media customers to provide sufficient information to customize print media. In addition, integration of print media and Internet sites can be effected—enabling cross-referencing of content, etc.
The customization of print media provides part of the solution to the problem of “information overload”, in that irrelevant information is less likely to be pushed on to readers. The more contextualized and relevant the information delivered to the individual consumer, the higher the value.
This invention provides a comprehensive method for effectively creating and managing customized print media through an enhanced content management process.